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Too many ideas and intentions have been percolating for some time in my head. It’s been almost two years since my last writing challenge when I forced myself to write a poem every day for thirty days straight with no clear goal. Surprisingly that challenge kept going longer than planned and turned into a monster collection of one hundred poems.

Clearly the habit tapped into a deep, rich well in my imagination I didn’t know existed. I remembered things I had forgotten. I sewed together symbols from my fragmented childhood into some kind of narrative. And some of these mysterious verses have even cross-polinated into my ‘real work’, into the writing of my screenplays.

Occasionally I continue the practice, writing scraps of poems on napkins until they make a complete thought. But nowadays I rely more on the crutch of inspiration than on habit. And so I’ve decided to give myself a similar challenge, but in a different medium – the Essay.

I’ll be writing a blog post everyday, without worrying about the results or the overall theme of the short pieces. There’s no community that I can rely upon, as I did with NaPoWriMo, except for the small, patient audience of this blog. I predict it will be an eclectic collection of thoughts and musings. Some of the posts will be housekeeping in nature, posts I had meant to write or complete but never got around to. But once I exhaust those old ideas, will I be able to continue creating something new every morning?

There is something ‘professional’ about showing up daily to work, even if the results are amateurish at first. There is something therapeutic in creating a quiet space where you can make sense of your own observations and distill them on paper instead of always being bombarded with the voices of others. There is something exciting about a new challenge.